Why are you reasoning from the words used to describe it?
"depressant" has also never meant "induces long term state of depression".
"depressant" has also never meant "induces long term state of depression".
On a more practical level, many people with clinical depression suffer from reduced affect, lethargy, and general lack of energy. Depressants will make those symptoms worse.
Studies say otherwise.[1][2]
> On a more practical level, many people with clinical depression suffer from reduced affect, lethargy, and general lack of energy. Depressants will make those symptoms worse.
Reduced affect is brought up all the time when talking about various things and people go "Oh noes! Reduced affect!" which only goes to show that they have no idea what the phrase means. It's not particularly negative in itself; it's only a diagnostic criteria of underlying disorders which have negative effects.
Lethargy and general lack of energy are the same thing.
So basically you have one negative symptom you claim ketamine will cause because it's a depressant. Given that it's a party drug taken in much-higher-than-clinical doses at raves where people dance for hours on it, you should maybe consider the idea that you don't know what you're talking about and stop talking.
To be clear, I'm not particularly in favor of ketamine in treatment. If you knew what you were talking about, you might have, for example, cited the most obvious side effect of ketamine which is bladder damage. Ketamine needs to be studied more, in my opinion, to find out whether the positives outweigh the negatives.
But your ignorant opinion based on the etymology of "depression" is actually detracting from this conversation and doesn't help us to study it. You're just spreading misinformation for no reason except your own ego.
[1] https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00088699
[2] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2014/ketamine.shtml
Dicking around with the chemistry of ketamine to make it safe and therapeutic as well as pre-cursory enough for consumption to generate the desired effect could take years though, and there still might be issues even then that would prevent it from general use....
Bit off topic - if there's one place where I am for patents, it's for pharma - takes years to find something that works, and when they finally do, it's only natural that they would want to recoup the money.
Who knows how much scientific justification they have to do so, but they are taking patients and so on.
> Given that it's a party drug taken in much-higher-than-clinical doses at raves where people dance for hours on it ...
You can make the same point about alcohol: people routinely ingest large amounts of alcohol and can still engage in lots of physical activity, despite it being a depressant.
If you decide to share your opinions on things you don't know about as if you do know about them, then I'm not sure what you're expecting. Warmth and acceptance?
> You can make the same point about alcohol: people routinely ingest large amounts of alcohol and can still engage in lots of physical activity, despite it being a depressant.
Yes and I will, because that's the entire point of what I'm saying. Just because something falls in the broad category of "depressant" doesn't mean it's going to make you lethargic.
Ketamine is used in a very small dose. There's plenty of research showing some beneficial effect.